Next-Generation Operations Management: Key Strategic Focus Areas for Industry 5.0 Readiness

The era of Industry 5.0 is characterised by a shift in strategic focus towards broader goals of human centricity, sustainability, and resilience, moving beyond the narrower focus on efficacy that defined Industry 4.0 era (Leng et al. 2022). Additionally, these overarching goals are increasingly challenged by evolving geopolitical and geoeconomic tensions that are prevalent today (Elsner, Atkinson & Zahidi 2025). To successfully navigate these challenges in the foreseeable future, operations managers must focus their attention on a few important priorities. Hence, this article explores five key strategic operations decision areas that future-ready operations managers need to prioritise and focus upon in order to address these new demands: (1) building strategic and operations agility, (2) augmenting operational processes, (3) strengthening operational resilience, (4) integrating sustainable and ethical practices, and (5) moving beyond customisation to hyper-personalisation. Drawing on insights from real-world case examples of technology-driven operations transformation successes and failures, this article looks at how operations managers can leverage these strategic decision areas to sustain competitive advantage and create greater value for all stakeholders, including society and the environment.